One of the best places to start if you want to understand the debate about whether we should be wearing masks in public is on the third floor of a restaurant in Guangzhou, China, seven months ago | liammannix
One of the best places to start if you want to understand the debate about whether we should be wearing masks in public is on the third floor of a restaurant in Guangzhou, China, seven months ago.
Two of the most-senior infection-control experts advising the federal government belong to the latter group. That’s why social distancing and hand washing are health authorities’ front-line weapons, rather than masks. This diagram, from a paper by Professor Morawska, shows how a virus can spread through a poorly-ventilated room.Yet the 1.5 metre rule has become “dogma” and held up the push for masks, said Director of the WHO Collaborating Centre for Air Quality at the Queensland University of Technology Professor Lidia Morawska.
Associate Professor Philip Russo is deputy-chair, and president of the Australasian College for Infection Prevention and Control.Sydney Morning Herald “There may not be direct contact between people, but they are close together in small, crowded spaces,” she said. “That’s exactly the space where these small particles don’t have to hang in the air for very long to get to someone else.”
“And the inappropriate wearing of masks can be more dangerous. You can end up touching the mask a lot, touching the face a lot, and end up contaminating yourself that way.”Setting aside how long COVID hangs in the air, the evidence for how well masks actually work to stop the spread of infection is more contested than you might think.
That paper has led many experts, as well as the Australian Medical Association, to back calls for mask-wearing in Melbourne.
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